Land Use and Tenure

Three categories of landownership existed in Cyprus during the
Ottoman period: private, state, and communal. This division continued to
characterize landholding in the Greek Cypriot area in 1990. Most land
was privately owned. The largest private landowner was the Church of
Cyprus, whose holdings before the Turkish invasion included an estimated
5.8 percent of the island's arable land.

Unrestricted legal ownership of private land dated only from 1946,
when the British administration enacted a new land law that superseded
the land code in effect under the Ottomans, in which all agricultural
land belonged to the state. Those who worked the land were in effect
hereditary tenants, whose right to the land was usufructuary. Land could
be transmitted from father to son, but could not be disposed of
otherwise without official permission.

The Immovable Property (Tenure, Registration, and Valuation) Law of
1946 established the present-day legal basis for landholding. All former
state lands that had been properly acquired by individuals were declared
to be private property; private property as defined in the former
Ottoman land code also continued to be private property. Communal land
remained the property of villages or towns, and all unoccupied and
vacant land not lawfully held (most forest land, for example) became
state land.

Both Greek and Turkish inheritance practices required the division of
an estate among the surviving heirs. At the time of the 1946 law,
fragmentation of land was already great, many holdings did not have
access roads, and owners frequently possessed varying numbers of plots
that might be separated by distances of several kilometers.

Despite the 1946 law, however, fragmentation of plots continued. The
1946 census showed 60,179 holdings averaging 7.2 hectares. By 1960 the
number of holdings had risen to 69,445, an increase of 15.4 percent, and
the average holding had decreased to 6.2 hectares. By 1974 the average
holding was an estimated 5 hectares. Holdings were seldom a single piece
of land; most consisted of small plots, an average of ten per holding in
1960. In some villages, the average number of plots was 40, and extremes
of 100 plots held by a single farmer were reported.

The government enacted the Land Consolidation Law of 1969 to resolve
the problem of land tenure. The law established the Central Land
Consolidation Authority, with the power to buy and also acquire
compulsorily land and other property, which it could sell or use for
land consolidation. The authority's board included members of several
ministries and departments and also representatives of the farmers. At
the village level, committees of government representatives and local
farmers coordinated and supervised the local program.

Land consolidation consisted of merging fragmented holdings. Dual and
multiple holdings were to be eliminated, and plots smaller than the
minimums listed in the 1946 land law were to be expropriated.
Government-owned land could be used to enlarge holdings; recipients
could purchase the land at current market prices, paying in installments
at low interest rates. A farmerowner who lost land in the redistribution
process was to receive land having the same value as his former holding.
The land consolidation program also involved the construction of a
service road network to connect all plots to larger roads.

By the end of 1988, twenty-eight land consolidation projects had been
completed, and thirty-one projects were underway. Where projects had
been completed, minute plots were almost completely eliminated, the
average size of plots increased by 100 percent, and the number of plots
declined by about 70 percent.